Yep -- we have a bucket list* filled with items like freedom to be what we want, an absence of chaos, kissable moments, ability to travel, and so on. It isn't a bunch of places to visit. But if we did have such a list, the Everglades, the Florida Keys as well as reconnecting with one of my cousins and his family would be on it.
Best Part:
Beginning with the most important stuff and at the end of this leg of our year of van life, the last thing we did before we left Florida was fulfill on that last item. What an amazing afternoon and evening with cousin Mike and his family in Jacksonville, Fl.
THE FUN PICTURE: That's my cousin Mike (AKA Bob) back row left, with Bill and Me. Mike's family is in the front row: Derrick (son in law with long arms), Wanda (Mike's wife) and Rachael (their daughter). Great and gracious family! THE OTHER PICTURE: Mike, Derrick, Rachael, Bill, Wanda.
Picking up our narrative from two weeks earlier...
.... from Dade City, Fl, where we left this narrative in our last post, we headed west. Before we left, though we snapped a picture of two Florida Sandhill Cranes, sauntering around Dade City-- this picture is for you, Sheryl Winsby:
Back to leaving Dade City... Off we went to the charming little seaport of Tarpon Springs. It was settled by Greek immigrants and its main industry, besides tourism, is sponge harvesting. This is still done by 'spongers' (divers) that walk the sea floor and cut the sponges that grow there, leaving enough of the sponge to regenerate the next ones. The boats coming into port are strung with them:
Any one as old as we are may remember all the diving shows made by Lloyd Bridges. I watched them with my dad as a little girl. The construction supervisor on the Habitat build recommended a 1948 suspense movie starring Lloyd Bridges along with Lon Chaney entitled "16 Fathoms Deep" -- its a black and white fictional story about the beginnings of the sponge diving industry in Tarpon Springs. We found it on YouTube. Gives you a good hint at this whole industry.
Another tip from a fellow Care-A-Vanner directed us to the Tampa Electric Company (TECO) -- Indeed, we spent an entire afternoon next to a drain pipe discharging unwanted warm water from a power plant into an inlet. It turns out the warm effluence creates a winter habitat for manatees, who seek TECO's warmed-up inlet when the Gulf of Mexico seems too chilly to them. To its credit TECO has built quite the viewing area to see them. And see them we did -- at least 100 manatees swimming in the greenish water of an inlet from Tampa Bay. And a couple of sharks in the mix.
There's only one Everglades
Baby's next stop -- Everglades National Park. We visited with rangers, went snail hunting with a volunteer, took a back country boat ride (not an airboat ride; those seem to be offered only outside the park) through Mangrove trees with air roots. We camped among Mahogany trees on the shore of Florida Bay.
A Mangrove Tree with roots exposed and if you look carefully you can see air roots extending towards the water from branches.
As the rangers (and a whole bunch of signs) will tell you, there is only one Everglades. There's no other place like it in the world. While enduring what we are now calling "The Great Disney Chaos" in mid-Florida, we spotted a stream north of Kissammee sporting a sign that said it was the start of the Everglades system. It looked pretty unimpressive, but it turned out to be true. It feeds the centrally located Lake Okeechobee, which in the winter overflows to form a huge subtropical wetland. The spilled water flows through a huge prairie covering most of southern Florida, mostly of saw grass, creating a slow moving, shallow river that filters the water and carries it through the National Park to deposit it in the Florida Bay.
If you look very closely at this picture, you'll find an alligator.
The everglades were nothing like we expected. They need to be experienced to begin to understand it, and if you do, we promise you'll find it awe-inspiring. We did confirm a healthy population of alligators, crocodiles, manatees, all sorts of fish, and other fauna. And gorgeous birds everywhere.
We joined a back country boat tour leaving the (flamingo-less) Flamingo marina. The crocodile, the green herons (little), grey herons and even the great blue herons we see farther North. All of these, and many ibises of different varieties were spotted in the Mangrove canal. And that's a 40 year old Osprey nest.
We found this beauty in the same canal. She's a female Anhinga. The males have black necks. Also known as a snake bird because that neck is really long.
Key West Sightings:
That orange iguana resided in a hedge just next to our van door at Boyd's campground in KeyWest. The tortoise was living in a Key West Garden. The six (or seven)-toed cat was part of a thriving and evidently genetically isolated population of such cats at Hemingway's Key West Home. The chickens, for those of you who don't know, are descendants of a left over population after cock fighting became illegal in Key West and caged chickens were released onto the streets. These cuties are now protected, and cohabitate with all other citizenry.
I fell in love with the goofy pelicans! All these are taken from our dockside campsite.
A goofy land mammal that I'm crazy about is pictured below -- his picture was snapped at
The Rum Bar, in Key West. It is a bar offering 400+ different kinds of rum. Besides drinking a (very) little (watery)rum, we sampled Cuban, Bahamian, and seafood dishes at three other establishments, as well as key lime pie at a cuban coffee bar. All this noshing was part of a food and culture walking tour, led by Maxwell, a true Conch (born in Key West). Acquiring the food samples involved a walk through a few different neighborhoods, each of which looked like a genuinely fun place to live. Maxwell snapped the picture of both of us in front of the Key West light house. Lore has it that early settlers made their living by looting ship wrecks. If business got a little slow the keeper of the light was bribed to just turn the thing off every now and then. We guess the maxim is true: you gotta' spend money to make money.
Tour guide Maxwell also offered a 'loud music' tour of Duval Street -- the tourist and night-life heart of Key West. Parades, festivals, bars, clubs, and magnificent eating. There were some shows we would have enjoyed but mostly it was just a little too loud and crowded for us and we took a pass. We experienced the quieter side on a different day when we walked a Volksmarch that began in the the very busy Key West port (with a cruise ship in port), but then showed us some neighborhoods. We also sought a vegan restaurant and that led us through a quieter part of Key West.
Loved Key West
It seems a happy, celebratory, easy going place that questions authority and doesn't worry about much. Wouldn't mind living there! (But would our kids ever visit?)
Florida-- wrapping it up:
The land -- the land itself-- is the wonder of it all. An odd peninsula shape piece of land trailing a row of magnificent keys, all scrubbed clean by the Everglades, the wind or the ocean, sitting on aquifers, surrounding rivers, and lakes in abundance, all with surrounding oceans. Geographically, it is truly lands' end and not just for Florida, but for the US and the entire North American Continent.
So how did these islands and this peninsula come to be? Why are the rocks so full of holes? How can this place survive sea level rise? Curiosity led us to poke around a few museum web sites:
It turns out that a few zillion years ago, when Pangea broke into the tectonic plates that ultimately created the continents, a small piece of the African plate stayed with the North American Plate, and that became Florida. That was followed by 200 million years of calcium carbonate deposited from the warm ocean waters, now a few miles thick. How much of that emerges from the ocean as land depends on the climate over the eons, and right now we have what we have. We drove its perimeter, visited its center, and understand why so many folks love this place.
*Here is our entirely plagiarized bucket list -- it fits us. Credit to its author.
Retirement Lesson: What we are planning is whatever life gives.
WOYAYA
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